RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Lord McDonald reveals the contempt in which the political class hold the people who pay their wages
Was that ‘Lord’ McDonald waving the blue and gold European Union flag in the front row of the Last Night of the Proms at the Albert Hall on Saturday night?
(All together now, to the tune of Land of Hope and Glory: ‘We hate Boris Johnson, We hate Farage, too, We hate Rees-Mogg and Dorries, But EU we love you!’)
Not a clue, to be honest. I’d never heard of him and until yesterday hadn’t got the faintest idea what he looked like. And I’m supposed to keep a keen eye on politics for a living, so that you don’t have to.
I’m aware of Ken Macdonald, who ran the Crown Prosecution Service years before Keir Starmer, and to his great credit accused Tony Blair of lying us into the Iraq war. Good egg, by all accounts.
There was a Gus Macdonald, who worked for ITV’s World In Action, and I seem to remember ended up as a Labour peer. ‘Baron’ Macdonald of Tradeston, wherever that is. But it’s not him, either.
Lord Big Mac wasn’t directly involved in the Stop Brexit negotiations… but he played a key role in keeping Boris as far away from the fray as possible
And there was always a half-chance it could be Malcolm Macdonald, turbo-charged goal-scoring machine for Fulham, Luton, Newcastle, England and that other North London team who play in red. If ever anyone deserved a peerage, he did. Not Supermac, sadly.
Could he be Ronald McDonald, the legendary hamburger clown? Tragically, not. At least we’d have got fries with him, and a plastic toy.
Nope, ‘Lord’ McDonald is, or was, head of the Foreign Office during and after Brexit. He also answers to Simon McDonald, in the family, though it turns out he’s a Baron, too.
(Where did we get all these Red Barons from? Bring on Snoopy versus, etc. Eins, zwei, drei, vier… )
The reason Lord McD has come to our attention is that he has admitted in a BBC documentary that he boasted to his staff about voting Remain in the referendum.
Even Laura Wossname, the presenter — and no friend of Brexit, like 99.99 of her BBC colleagues to the best of my knowledge — had the decency to look surprised.
Wasn’t this admission a clear breach of the Civil Service’s sacred code of impartiality?
One hundred and eighty! But his lordship doesn’t give a damn.
‘On this occasion, this solitary occasion, I decided to tell my colleagues — and therefore let ministers know — that I voted to Remain in the EU. I felt they would assume that in any case, so I decided to embrace it.’
Of course, they’d assume it. Whitehall in 2016 was 95 per cent against leaving the EU. In the Foreign Office, that figure would have been an underestimate.
Think I’m making this up? Allow me to quote Ronald, sorry ‘Lord’, McDonald’s own words.
‘I was trying to maintain credibility and convey a message to a group of people, most of whom I felt had voted to Remain in the EU, that their personal feelings were beside the professional point.
Was that ‘Lord’ McDonald waving the blue and gold European Union flag in the front row of the Last Night of the Proms at the Albert Hall on Saturday night?
‘It was a personal decision. My board were not entirely comfortable and all these years later you can have a conversation about was it right, the right decision.
‘The main feeling in the Foreign Office building was of mourning. People were in tears. People were in shock.’
And there you have it, in a pistachio nutshell. The civil service flunkeys employed by us to do as they’re told by elected ministers were grief-stricken by a majority vote to leave the EU.
The very officials entrusted to protect our national interest and sovereignty owed their principal allegiance to an anti-democratic multinational bloc and would have us back inside its suffocating embrace in a heartbeat.
Ever since the momentous vote to Leave in 2016, they have moved heaven and earth to stop it happening.
Lord Big Mac wasn’t directly involved in the Stop Brexit negotiations under Remainer Theresa May, our worst PM since Grocer Heath. But he played a key role in keeping Boris as far away from the fray as possible.
After making BoJo Foreign secretary, once he’d been stitched up by Gove, Mother Theresa deliberately excluded the Foreign Office from the Brexit talks, despite the fact that this was Britain’s biggest foreign policy decision since the outbreak of war in 1939.
McDonald was Boris’s designated minder, a sort of FO version of Terry McCann. It was his job to keep Johnson in detention while May sold Britain down the Danube.
‘Northern Ireland border agreement, Foreign Sec? Let’s have a large VAT in the Winchester and the grown-ups can sort it out.’
Truth is that Lord Golden Arches was one of the four most senior civil servants in the country at the time — the unelected ‘quad’ if you like. He may not have been in the room, but he would have undoubtedly been among those pulling Mother Theresa’s strings, along with the appalling, full-of-himself Cabinet Secretary Mark ‘Three Jobs’ Sedwill – Rod Hull to May’s Emu.
And rather than be content to play Secret Squirrel, McD is now confident enough to brag about his bias. Clearly, he saw his primary role as assuaging recalcitrant Remainers in the civil service rather than carrying out the democratically-expressed wishes of the British people.
There’s a discernable twinkle in his eye as he confesses to Laura Wossname his true loyalty.
(Tell Boris it was nothing personal, strictly business. I always liked him.)
I watched Part One of this documentary with an open mind. For the first half hour or so, it seemed pretty even handed.
After all, it flushed out McD in his true colours. But it soon became apparent that the Brexiteers were always going to be portrayed as the bad guys.
Lord Quarter Pounder referred to the Leavers as ‘the awkward squad’, when the real awkward squad were the civil servants and MPs — led by that grinning gargoyle Speaker Bercow — determined to thwart the will of the electorate.
May’s disastrous, intergalactically arrogant Chancellor Philip ‘Spread Fear Phil’ Hammond admitted that the Treasury tried to engineer a ‘soft Brexit’ – ie: No Brexit, in any meaningful sense of the word.
The more I saw of this documentary, the one thing which became glaringly apparent was the contempt in which the political class — and I include most MPs along with the standing army of bureaucrats — hold the people who pay their wages.
Brexit, despite being in receipt of the largest number of votes for anything in our nation’s history, was considered in Whitehall and Westminster as a terrible mistake which had to be overturned come what may.
We kid ourselves that we live in a democracy, but the reality is that we are regarded as an ignorant, lumpen mob to be ignored and punished whenever possible.
Brexit, or Genghis Khan’s totalitarian ULEZ expansion? Jail sentences for not meeting Net Zero targets? Fines of hundreds of pounds for doing 21 mph on the Finchley Road? The Bubble always knows best.
It turns out that, at one stage, there was even a plan to dump Mother Theresa and replace her as PM with some non-entity called David Lidington (nope, me, neither) who would then call a second referendum aimed at overturning Leave, backed by the majority of MPs, the entire civil service and the BBC.
Laura Wossname has, perhaps unwittingly, done us a favour by lifting the stone on this Very British Coup.
But don’t forget that these are the same people who knifed Boris for trying to Get Brexit Done, after a fashion, and — whatever he claims now for the sake of expediency — Keir Starmer will drag us back into the EU in everything but name, with the full backing of the civil service.
As the IRA’s Gerry Adams remarked in another context, seven years on from the Brexit vote the lunatics waving EU flags at the Albert Hall haven’t gone away, you know.
Altogether now…
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